The 21st Republican Tea Party: No Bottom to Their Abyss

Remember the good old days when Republican-Tea Partyers' political attack ads placed rifle scope crosshairs over their Democratic Party opponents' congressional districts? Sarah Palin urged Tea Party candidates to "reload" and "aim" for Democrats.

Arizona congressional candidate Jesse Kelly who opposed Gabriel Giffords put out political ads inviting his supporters to a rally to "Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

During the frenzy of gun rhetoric Allen West's chief of staff, screech radio host Joyce Kaufman, shrieked, "If ballots don't work bullets will." That incendiary statement caused Florida's Broward County to immediately close schools and send 250,000 schoolchildren home because of the fears of escalating gun violence. Allen West was defeated in his reelection bid in 2012 but he recently joined his like-minded cohorts on Fox News who are presently on a Benghazi Obama impeachment crusade which is devolving more into a risible Sisyphean parody.

Rush Limbaugh spouted, "I tell people don't kill all the liberals, leave enough around so we can have two on every campus; living fossils, so we will never forget what these people stood for."

Ted Nugent raged, "Obama, he's a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary [Clinton], you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch."

Yes, those were the old days when Republicans made Violence a political strategy and Hate their guiding principle that they plan to carry right into 2014 and 2016. But, they have now upped their game, or should we say, lowered the depth of the cavity, into which they keep sinking.

Enter the Republican Party's malignant, more violent, more threatening and more abominable version, Hate radio host, Pete Santilli. Santilli has been recruited as their latest depraved Republican attack dog with his indirect threats on the life of the President Barack Obama and direct threats on the life of possible 2016 presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

"I want to shoot her [Clinton] right in the vagina and I don't want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say, on behalf of all Americans that you've killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS, the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama, Obama bin Laden thing, that whole fake scenario, because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all. On behalf of all of those people, I'm supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina."

Santilli added, "Barack Obama needs to be tried, convicted, and shot for crimes against the United States of America." "And if anybody has a problem with that, then you are an enemy of our state."

We should never make the mistake that this guy's comments are an aberration. They are not. They are the summation and distillation of the past 4 years of Republicans' boiling anger and intense, palpable hatred of Barack Obama.

That seething resentment and acrimony were a large part of the Tea Party emergence in 2010 in the aftermath of their violent gun rhetoric that catapulted so many of them to office on a media-fed belief that they represented a groundswell of support.

That support has collapsed as the Rasmussen poll taken earlier this year which shows only 8% of voters now identify with the subversive Tea Party and their surrogates like Pete Santilli.

Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ted Nugent, Ann Coulter and other bilge have made millions off of spreading racist, hateful attacks against the President from Day One when he first took the oath of office on January 20, 2009.

Incivility has become the Republicans' modus operandi. It is a well-practiced strategy and political doctrine in their ongoing venom-filled attacks that they have committed to pursue between now and 2016 regardless of the outcome in the midterm 2014 elections.

Santilli exemplifies the vile metastasizing of a Republican-Tea Party descent into an ever deeper sulfurous abyss. He is the next vile phase of their vitriol and an escalation of their undisguised, unapologetic use of gun threats against political opponents.

He defines the entire Republican-Tea Partyers' deviant, rotted ideology. This is who they are and what they have become in the 21st Century.